Theorizing Adaptation in the Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-138
Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Recording Device ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Copyright Laws ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Literature And Film

Chapter 3 discusses how, just as new copyright laws were legitimizing intermedial adaptations, modernist theories drastically diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation with their rejection of the past and celebration of the new. Modernism shattered adaptation into allusions: studying allusions as adaptations would indubitably help to restore the theoretical fortunes of adaptation under modernism. Modernism’s hostility to mass culture was often aimed at adaptation: even theorists valorizing other popular cultural forms opposed it. Requiring film to dissociate from other art forms in order to emerge as an art in its own right, rather than as a craft or a recording device for other arts, medium specificity theory undermined adaptation in literature-and-film studies. Affecting all kinds of adaptation, the formalist turn diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation by rejecting the cultural theories that had valorized adaptation in prior centuries. Joined to medium specificity theories and structuralist semiotics, intermedial adaptation became not only aesthetically undesirable but also theoretically impossible under theories that content cannot separate from form to appear in another medium. With the advent of the theoretical turn in the humanities, adaptation became a battleground upon which theoretical wars were fought, battles that, paradoxically, foregrounded it. By the 1990s, adaptation was becoming an established, if divided, diasporic field, engaging a panoply of theories.

scholarly journals The Idea of Russian Symbolism about the Synthesis of Cultural Forms in the Context of Postmodern Culture

ICONI ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 126-136
Author(s):  
Nadezhda A. Tsareva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
Postmodern Art ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Synthetic Media ◽  
Integrity Of Life

The relevance of the topic is due to the attention to trends in the development of culture. The synthesis of cultural forms is one of the important factors in the dynamics of culture. The teaching of Russian symbolism about the synthesis of cultures was analyzed in the scientifi c literature of the entire twentieth century. The novelty of the research is to compare the idea of art synthesis in the early twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. Two aspects of the idea of synthesis are considered: 1) the relevance of the idea of art synthesis in the postmodern era; 2) music and the visual series as organizing centers of art synthesis in the era of information technology. The purpose of this article is to examine the teaching of Russian symbolism about the integration of various forms of art and the features of synthesis in the postmodern era. The idea of integrating cultural forms was one of the key elements in Russian symbolism at the beginning of the twentieth century and was interpreted as a real prospect for the development of culture. In a broad sense, synthesis in symbolism meant the integrity of life, the integration of all spheres of human activity, the “organic connection” of cultures of the past and present. The synthesis can be realized on the basis of the art of symbolism, which can create a new culture. The synthesis of arts was understood as the beginning of the formation of a new culture. The core of the synthesis of arts, the symbolists saw music. Postmodern art is characterized by synthetism. Computer and information technologies create new forms of synthetic media art. The video series becomes the center of integration construction of postmodern audiovisual culture forms. The symbolist idea of the synthesis of arts as the beginning of cultural change in the postmodern era remains a utopian project. But the creation of new art forms in postmodern culture i s based on integration. New technologies are becoming a factor that determines the specifi cs of the synthesis of arts and infl uences the dynamics of culture. Both in Russian symbolism and in modern art, the goal of art synthesis is to present an integral image of the world, to form a system of worldview attitudes.

scholarly journals Studies of Chinese Cinema in Japan

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Seio Nakajima
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Chinese Cinema ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fifth Generation ◽  
Production Distribution ◽  
Post War ◽  
Political Turmoil ◽  
Film Text ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
Academic Interests

Abstract Japanese interests in Chinese cinema go as far back as to the 1910s, when film magazines reported on the situation of Chinese cinema. Discussions of Chinese cinema began to flourish in the 1920s, when intellectuals wrote travelogue essays on Chinese cinema, particularly on Shanghai cinema. In the mid-1930s, more serious analytical discourses were presented by a number of influential contemporary intellectuals, and that trend continued until the end of WWII. Post-War confusion in Japan, as well as political turmoil in China, dampened academic interests of Japanese scholars on Chinese cinema somewhat, but since the re-discovery of Chinese cinema in the early 1980s with the emergence of the Fifth Generation, academic discussions on Chinese cinema resumed and flourished in the 1980s and the 1990s. In the past decade or so, interesting new trends in studies of Chinese cinema in Japan are emerging that include more transnational and comparative approaches, focusing not only on film text but the context of production, distribution, and exhibition. Moreover, scholars from outside of the disciplines of literature and film studies—such as cultural studies, history, and sociology—have begun to contribute to rigorous discussions of Chinese cinema in Japan.

scholarly journals Keeping Count of the End of the World: A Statistical Analysis of the Historiography, Canonisation, and Historical Fluctuations of Anglophone Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Disaster Narratives

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Määttä
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
Disaster Narratives ◽  
Literature And Film

Over the past decade, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic disaster narratives seem to have become more popular than ever before. Since its inception in secular form in the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, the genre has experienced a number of fluctuations in popularity, especially in the twentieth century. Inspired by Franco Moretti’s influential Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), the aim of this study is to analyse the historiography, canonisation, and historical fluctuations of Anglo-phone apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic disaster narratives in literature and film through an elementary statistical analysis of previous surveys of the field. While the small database on which the study is based essentially consists of a meta-study of historiography and canonisation within the genre, disclosing which works have been considered to be the most important, the data is also used to assess the periods in which the most influential, innovative, and/or popular works were published or released. As an attempt is also made to explain some of the fluctuations in the popularity of the genre - with an eye to historical, cultural, medial, social, and political contexts – perhaps the study might help us understand why it is that we as a society seem to need these stories ever so often.

On the Translatability of Cultural Phenomena: Modernismo and Modernism within and without Mass Culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-359
Author(s):  
Guido Herzovich
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Octavio Paz ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Relational Concepts ◽  
Aesthetic Concepts

Abstract “Spanish American modernismo,” wrote Octavio Paz in 1972, “has no connection to what in English is called ‘modernism.’” Indeed, for a long time there was consensus in both critical traditions that “despite some parallels,” as Astradur Eysteinsson put it, “the differences between the two concepts are too many to warrant their critical coalescence.” In recent years, however, it has become the rule to discuss Latin American and Spanish modernismos within the Anglo-Germanic notion of modernism, as part of the broader concept of “global modernisms.” But how did two of the most important aesthetic concepts of the twentieth century from two distinct traditions go from misleading cognates to variants of the same phenomenon? This article offers a comparative history to explain the conditions of their mutual (un)translatability. It presents their divergent beginnings, briefly surveys their independent developments, and finally argues that, in the past few decades, both have similarly turned from differential to relational concepts mainly by transforming their relationship to mass culture. They have thus gone from high-literary ideologies of exclusion to fields of research on the networks and dynamics of modern culture. As they did, however, their standing within their respective critical traditions has changed in opposite ways.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

Modernism Under Review: Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First World

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.

Collective Memory: Between Values and Historical Knowledge

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-142
Author(s):  
VICTOR BURLACHUK
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Main Element ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

At the end of the twentieth century, questions of a secondary nature suddenly became topical: what do we remember and who owns the memory? Memory as one of the mental characteristics of an individual’s activity is complemented by the concept of collective memory, which requires a different method of analysis than the activity of a separate individual. In the 1970s, a situation arose that gave rise to the so-called "historical politics" or "memory politics." If philosophical studies of memory problems of the 30’s and 40’s of the twentieth century were focused mainly on the peculiarities of perception of the past in the individual and collective consciousness and did not go beyond scientific discussions, then half a century later the situation has changed dramatically. The problem of memory has found its political sound: historians and sociologists, politicians and representatives of the media have entered the discourse on memory. Modern society, including all social, ethnic and family groups, has undergone a profound change in the traditional attitude towards the past, which has been associated with changes in the structure of government. In connection with the discrediting of the Soviet Union, the rapid decline of the Communist Party and its ideology, there was a collapse of Marxism, which provided for a certain model of time and history. The end of the revolutionary idea, a powerful vector that indicated the direction of historical time into the future, inevitably led to a rapid change in perception of the past. Three models of the future, which, according to Pierre Nora, defined the face of the past (the future as a restoration of the past, the future as progress and the future as a revolution) that existed until recently, have now lost their relevance. Today, absolute uncertainty hangs over the future. The inability to predict the future poses certain challenges to the present. The end of any teleology of history imposes on the present a debt of memory. Features of the life of memory, the specifics of its state and functioning directly affect the state of identity, both personal and collective. Distortion of memory, its incorrect work, and its ideological manipulation can give rise to an identity crisis. The memorial phenomenon is a certain political resource in a situation of severe socio-political breaks and changes. In the conditions of the economic crisis and in the absence of a real and clear program for future development, the state often seeks to turn memory into the main element of national consolidation.

Aftershocks

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seva Gunitsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
International System ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sudden Rise ◽  
The World ◽  
National Borders

Over the past century, democracy spread around the world in turbulent bursts of change, sweeping across national borders in dramatic cascades of revolution and reform. This book offers a new global-oriented explanation for this wavelike spread and retreat—not only of democracy but also of its twentieth-century rivals, fascism, and communism. The book argues that waves of regime change are driven by the aftermath of cataclysmic disruptions to the international system. These hegemonic shocks, marked by the sudden rise and fall of great powers, have been essential and often-neglected drivers of domestic transformations. Though rare and fleeting, they not only repeatedly alter the global hierarchy of powerful states but also create unique and powerful opportunities for sweeping national reforms—by triggering military impositions, swiftly changing the incentives of domestic actors, or transforming the basis of political legitimacy itself. As a result, the evolution of modern regimes cannot be fully understood without examining the consequences of clashes between great powers, which repeatedly—and often unsuccessfully—sought to cajole, inspire, and intimidate other states into joining their camps.

A Deep Pocket for the Truth of the Times

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Germana
Keyword(s):  
Music Criticism ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical View ◽  
Sense Of Time ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
The Times ◽  
Musical Forms

Chapter 5 treats Ellison’s music criticism as an expression of his commitment to durational time and a critique of cultural forms like bebop that, in Ellison’s estimation, lend form to a discontinuous present. Rather than suggest, as many critics have, that Ellison was simply nostalgic for danceable swing music or hostile toward emerging musical forms, this chapter shows that Ellison’s primary criticism of bebop is that it formalizes a discontinuous sense of time and thereby affirms an historical view of the past structured by an analogous, sequentially static sense of time. Ellison’s problem with bebop, in other words, is neither musicological nor sociological, but temporal. Folk jazz and the blues, by contrast, affirm a durational view of time in the form of a “pocket” or groove entirely unlike the spatialized groove of history described in Invisible Man. In short, Ellison finds in musical grooves antidotes to the groove of history.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Heritage Industry ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter introduces the concept of the “archaeomodern” and its connection to the aging of the quintessential modern medium of film. It sketches the historical and cultural background of the archaeomodern turn in the late twentieth century, including the development of an obsession with the past in the heritage industry and the rise of postmodernism. It then discusses two phenomena from the 1980s and 1990s—a mannerist or baroque revival, and the development of media archaeology—that complicate the habitual association between tradition and the past or modernity and the future. The introduction suggests that archaeomodern cinema was characterized by the return to failed or abandoned modern experiments and other relics from the modern past.

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